


By Choice Or Chance

by Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody



Series: Windmills & Windowsills [1]
Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: M/M, Scala ad Caelum (Kingdom Hearts)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-17
Updated: 2019-02-17
Packaged: 2019-10-30 03:05:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17820614
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody/pseuds/Six_Piece_Chicken_McNobody
Summary: Lazy afternoons are a universal phenomenon.





	By Choice Or Chance

**Author's Note:**

> Scala is like a fairy-tale kingdom: beautiful, elegant, and a little foreboding. You get the sense that people aren't meant to stay there too long. Probably a nice playground for tricksters, though.  
> The only real shipping content here is Xehanort's burgeoning and obvious crush on his best friend.

Gulls wheel overhead, squawking incoherently as they race to the ocean. Eraqus waits until they’re gone and the silence has returned before he asks, “Was that you talking just now?”

Xehanort, half-reclined and leaning back on his elbows, doesn’t bother answering. He stretches his leg and shoves Eraqus with his foot, and Eraqus laughs less at his own dumb joke than at Xehanort’s dry reaction to it. He grabs Xehanort’s ankle and pushes him away before he gets comfortable again, sprawling on the grass, limbs spread like the points of a star.

Their laziness today is well-earned. It’s hotter than usual out, and the sun beats down like the sky’s own heart, searing the white buildings. The grassy spots are nice, at least. Much different from the stiff, spiky brush found on the seaside. When Xehanort runs his fingertips over this grass, he can, in its delicate coolness, actually detect life.

He tries to make the most of their quiet afternoon, but even half-asleep, Eraqus insists on conversation. “Hey. How long’s it been now?”

“What, since I kicked your ass in the ring? About two hours.”

Eraqus scoffs. “It was at _least_ a day ago,” he says, and Xehanort smiles at his willingness to play along. “I meant,” Eraqus goes on, “how long have you been living in Scala?”

Xehanort has to think it over. He tries not to measure his life based on those years before he came to the archipelago. And his sense of time has been slipping in general lately, as his schedule fills up with studying and training. “Eight months,” he finally says, figuring it’s a close enough estimate. Eraqus nods, then winces. He unties his hair and shakes his ponytail as loose as it can get, though the crease from the hair band remains. He lays his head down again with a contented sigh.

“Remember your first day?”

“Of course.”

“Yeah?” Eraqus folds his hands behind his head, settling in even more. “Tell me about it. What was it like when you arrived?”

“You tell me—you were there.” When Eraqus gives Xehanort a quizzical look, Xehanort responds with an unamused one. “You almost knocked me into the harbor,” he clarifies, still remembering how some overzealous stranger had run past and jostled him before he’d taken ten steps off the ferry, still remembering how close he’d come to losing his duffel bag—and every worldly possession he had left—to the deep blue water.

Eraqus grins sheepishly and closes his eyes again. “I, uh…don’t remember _that_ ,” he says unconvincingly. “How about the rest?”

Xehanort shrugs to keep his shoulders from stiffening up. “It was stunning,” he says. “The sheer size of this place. It took me forever to wrap my mind around it, and even longer to notice the other towns. I couldn’t begin to process how many there were. I hadn’t even made it off the pier, and I already needed to sit down.”

He pauses to recall the details more vividly. “I remember that the black and gold gate looked jarring against all the white. I remember the mosaic stones just past the entrance, in the lower square—the blue and purple ones. And I remember hearing music. Cello, I think, though I never managed to track down where it was coming from. Most of all, I could smell the sea. But it smelled…different. Not like the ocean I was used to.” He seems like he’s trying to figure out how to describe it, but if he comes up with anything, he keeps it to himself. Still, Eraqus is impressed.

“You’ve got a good memory.”

“I know.”

Eraqus yawns, taking the warm air and sunshine itself into his belly. “And before you came here?”

Xehanort has no idea why they keep revisiting this topic. The islands haven’t held any intrigue for him since he was six years old, and it isn’t as if he has new information to share. But he shares anyway.

“Every day was more or less the same. The town was on the main island, and the smaller island was essentially an oversized playground. It was barely worth the boat ride. The other kids seemed to like it, though. They’d head over there for the day, and I’d get some peace and quiet on the main island to take a walk or read a book.”

Eraqus nods absentmindedly, and Xehanort wonders if he’s just providing conversational white noise so his friend can doze off. “There _was_ that big storm about fifteen years ago,” he says, dredging up some of the tall tales that the adults passed around when he was a child. “A waterspout lifted the entire island out of the ocean and put it down backwards. Then there was the time everyone at my school got paopu poisoning. And the time my father went out in his fishing boat and was swallow by a whale. My mother was furious when he came home late, soaking wet, and without dinner. ‘You’re telling me you had an entire _whale_ , and you let it _go_?’”

A quick glance at Eraqus reveals no change in his demeanor. But just when Xehanort starts to believe that he’s truly fallen asleep, he mumbles, “What’s ‘paopu poisoning?’”

Xehanort isn’t surprised that this is what he’s chosen to focus on. Even with his head in the clouds, Eraqus is attentive, detail-oriented, and eternally curious. “Nothing—I made it up. The paopu was just a type of fruit that grew on the islands. Well, on the small island, not the main one,” Xehanort adds, wondering why that’s never struck him as odd before. “When it was ripe, it looked like a star. Would’ve been the island’s claim to fame if it weren’t such a backwater place.”

“Huh.” Eraqus blows on his hair, not caring which direction it falls as long as it’s out of his eyes. “Any good?”

“I never tried one.”

Eraqus nods slowly as if he understands the implication, which Xehanort has never subscribed to anyway. “Well…how about in between that?”

“Between what?” Xehanort asks, following his friend’s lead and reclining fully on the grass.

“After you left the islands, but before you arrived in Scala. What was that like?”

Xehanort’s brows pinch together. “I’ve told you,” he says, “I just came here. No crazy adventures. The trip was even duller than the islands themselves.”

“Oh, _psh_ ,” Eraqus says, scolding him. “The journey’s the interesting part. Points A and B are fixed, but there’s an infinite number of paths between them. So which one did you take?”

“Straight line.”

Eraqus smiles, undeterred. “Tell me about it anyway.”

Xehanort hesitates, reluctant to share this time. He has a strange feeling, one he’s been suppressing since the moment Eraqus started to ask about _before_ Scala.

Because truthfully, the harder he tries to remember, the hazier it gets.

It takes almost a full minute for Eraqus to show him mercy and break the silence. “You came here by water,” he explains, groaning as he sits up. He pulls his feet closer so he can rest his arms on his knees. “Everyone does. But not the way you think.”

Xehanort tries to think about it anyway, but after letting the balmy air relax him for over an hour, his mind isn’t up to the task. “I remember,” he half-lies, vaguely able to recall setting out from the island dock and drifting up to Scala’s port. In between, there was nothing but endless blue on all sides. “The sea was the only option for getting off my old world.” He rolls a blade of grass between his fingers until it slides from the soil without resistance. “I would’ve thought most people traveled by air to get here.”

“Why’s that?”

“…we’re in the sky,” Xehanort says, gesturing around and above them. “ _Caelum_.”

Eraqus smiles Xehanort’s most and least favorite smile, the one that says he not only has more knowledge than Xehanort, but more knowledge than he lets on in general. As much as it may frustrate Xehanort, it doesn’t discourage him. The prospect of _more_ was what had sent him running from the islands in the first place. Every world brims with information and secrets, and Xehanort knows there isn’t a single bit of it that he won’t relish learning for himself.

“ _Ad_ Caelum,” Eraqus corrects. “Scala is a way _to_ the sky. Point A for some, but point B for no one. Just another path, when you get down to it.”

“Right,” Xehanort says, loving his word choice, whether it was intentional or not: _a_ way, rather than _the_ way.

“It’s still a place, of course,” Eraqus goes on. “And a singularly beautiful one. In my opinion, anyway.” Xehanort silently agrees, and they rest without speaking for a while, soaking up the sun and enjoying the mild breeze and the distant call of the gulls.

“What about you?” Xehanort asks abruptly. Eraqus looks down at him and raises his eyebrows. “What’s _your_ ‘before Scala?’”

Eraqus’s gaze drifts upward, untethered as he retreats into his own thoughts. “Hmm. Nothing, now that you mention it. There’s just Scala.”

This truly surprises Xehanort. He knows Eraqus has been here since childhood, but it never occurred to him that these artificial islands could be his place of origin. “Your point A?”

Eraqus laughs quietly. “My point A,” he agrees. “Or close enough. Can’t really remember what came before, if anything.” He tries to sound casual, but it comes out more wistful, and he tosses Xehanort another quick smile before turning his attention back to the water.

Xehanort is no stranger to gazing at the ocean in contemplation, though he does it less often these days, finding it pointless now that he’s finally off the islands. “Well, if you can’t remember it, you probably don’t need to,” he says, and Eraqus blinks, drawn out of his reverie just as he’s starting to sink into it. He keeps his eyes on the water but turns his head a little to show that he’s listening. “I mean, almost everything that’s ever happened took place before we were born. We’ve already missed most of the worlds’ history—compared to that, a few years of your life is a drop in the bucket. You should focus on the future more, anyway,” he points out, stifling a yawn. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

Eraqus smiles faintly. “Guess so.”

Xehanort frowns. He’s worked hard to cultivate his reputation as a brooding introvert, and he doesn’t appreciate Eraqus edging into his territory. He squints as he looks up at Eraqus, who, at this angle, is backlit almost entirely by a fire-blue sky. “You’ve told me stories from as far back as age five. Does it really bother you that you can’t remember the rest?”

Eraqus doesn’t respond, verbally or otherwise, but Xehanort is prepared to wait him out. Their types of patience are opposites, he realizes, like seemingly everything else about them. Eraqus’s is allowing and accommodating. It adheres and adjusts to the natural flow of the world around him. But Xehanort’s “patience” is self-assured, rooted in the belief that as long as he can bide his time, everything he wants will eventually come to him, magnetized to his very will. He watches Eraqus, waiting for him to cave, but under his silent scrutiny, Eraqus only shrugs.

Xehanort turns his head away again. His chatty friend could have picked a better time to go tight-lipped, but he can work with it. He rolls the blade of grass between his thumb and forefinger until it’s pulverized, like he rolls his thoughts over in his head until they’re whittled down to what he wants to say. “You know how sand is formed?”

There’s a moment of silence while Xehanort waits for Eraqus’s reply, and he’s a little annoyed when it ends up being, “Is this, like…islander small talk?”

“It’s _supposed_ to be islander _wisdom_ ,” Xehanort says, sounding offended and imperious to the point of self-deprecation. Eraqus chuckles and waits for him to go on. “Look,” Xehanort says, abandoning his finely-crafted argument. “Sand is the leftover pieces of rocks, bones, shells—stuff that was actually memorable back when it was whole. Time changes things, sometimes by eroding them and shrinking them down. And that’s just how it goes. No one stops to admire every individual grain—you can’t even see most of them. But they’re essential. You can’t have a beach without a shore.”

Although Eraqus is still sitting with his arms around his knees, still gazing at the shoreless ocean before them, he’s listening intently, and Xehanort starts to feel oddly self-conscious. He drops the crumpled blade of grass and rubs his fingertips dry on the leg of his pants. “You _shouldn’t_ be able to remember everything,” he says. “It’s okay to forget. The brain keeps track of what you remember. The heart keeps track of what you don’t.” He sifts his fingertips through the grass. “And everything else is sand.”

The gulls have quieted, or simply flown too far away to hear, and the only sound left is the gentle, wooden creak of the windmills. When Xehanort glances at Eraqus, curious to know if his monologue was in any way helpful, he sees his friend looking down at him with a smile. Not his eager, fresh-faced grin, nor the smirk that means he’s about to start another round of playful insults. Just a small smile, calm and knowing and grateful.

Xehanort’s hand stills in the grass. Staring up at Eraqus and the sun is suddenly a little too bright, and he looks away again, though he keeps Eraqus in his periphery. That’s how he knows, even without looking, that it takes Eraqus an extra second to turn back to the water and rest his head on his knees.

They don’t talk for the remaining fifteen minutes of their break. When Eraqus finally musters the energy to stand, Xehanort stays where he is, one arm behind his head and a hand on his stomach, unwilling to move until Eraqus offers both hands and hauls him to his feet. He swipes at the grass and flower petals stuck to Xehanort’s shirt, then stretches his arms high above his head. “Ready to make the hike?” Eraqus asks, trying to sound refreshed and raring to go. Xehanort tips his head back and looks up the long slope to the topmost tower, where their studies await.

“No,” he says bluntly, and Eraqus drops his arms, slouching with relief.

“Gondola?”

“Gondola.”

They’re too old and far too drowsy to say “race ya.” They both know Xehanort would win anyway, especially since Eraqus once claimed to have never run for recreational purposes a day in his life. He’d said it like a joke, but Xehanort believes it wholeheartedly. So they take a leisurely walk to the station and wait for the next car to glide along the edge of the platform. Xehanort holds his arm out, instructing Eraqus to board first, and Eraqus ignores Xehanort’s attempt to look cool by casually stepping in at the last second.

It’s stuffy inside without a sea breeze to disperse the heat. Eraqus pries the window open as far as it will go—a few measly inches—and finally shucks his oversized white robe. He rolls it up and lays it on the bench like a pillow, reclining once more with his fingers laced over his stomach and one leg dangling. Xehanort sits on the opposite bench, leaning back and crossing his arms. “Don’t fall asleep.”

“Don’t forget to wake me,” Eraqus replies, and Xehanort snorts. Normally, he avoids the gondolas at all costs. The only thing that bothers him more than their slowness is his inability to do anything but sit and wait once he’s inside. But he isn’t in any hurry today, and he even finds himself lulled by the carriage’s steady climb. He tilts his head back and tries not to drift off, if only to avoid the future embarrassment of, _Wow, I was just kidding around; I didn’t think you’d_ seriously _forget to wake me._

Below him is the town, above him is the observatory-turned-training-center, and here he sits, suspended on the straight line that connects them. He can see more of the horizon the higher they go, and Xehanort is willing to admit that his friend—now snoring lightly a few feet away—might be right. However important the fixed points are, there’s something to be said for the journey between.


End file.
